Saturday, August 4, 2012

Olympic Hook-Ups

The company behind a popular dating app for gay men has denied that
the influx of athletes and tourists to London for the Olympic Games was
behind a sustained disruption to service.

Grindr, an app which displays a list of nearby users based on
proximity, and allowing them to exchange messages and pictures, had
experienced significant downtime in its services last week.

The downtime coincided with the arrival of many of the London 2012 athletes to the UK’s capital city – prompting British paper the Daily People to write that the arrival of the athletes had placed unprecedented demand on the service.

“It happened almost as soon as the teams got here,” its reported
quoted one Londoner as saying. “Either loads of athletes were logging on
to meet fellow Olympians or were looking to bag a local.”

Grindr chief executive Joel Simkhai admitted his frustrations with the
downtime, and describing the problems as “a challenging thing to
address”.

“We’re confident that we got the problem under control, and we put
additional measures in place to prevent this kind of disruption from
happening again,” he said.

In a further statement to tech news website the Daily Dot, though,
the company denied any fanciful suggestions that excessive demand from
Olympians had been the cause.

“While we’d love to believe that the best-built men in the world all
dressed up in Lycra and congregating in one place can generate a huge
increase in Grindr traffic,” the company chuckled, “we can say with
confidence that the arrival of the Olympic teams had little or no effect
on our server.”